Just a few words to expand upon the ideas introduced on Wednesday.
(Non policy wonks need not bother)
First off, we are not talking in terms of what is universally desirable. In fact the desirability of one outcome or another in this game is determined by where you sit. That is one of the great awakenings brought about by the Occupy movement - to wit, yes that swing to the right has benefited many people and they certainly can be expected to like it and fight for it, but it has also come at a cost.
The south after losing the civil war was negatively impacted for one hundred years. Hopefully things will not be so bad but we mustn’t lose sight that at the end of the day there are consequences that cannot be wished away
Secondly we are not speaking in terms of truth or knowledge in the usual sense. What we are trying to focus on are contesting information theories. By this I mean contesting blocks of information that are seeking predominance in terms of the public mind.
Not to be too cynical about things but if there’s one thing we ought to have learned from the advent of saturation advertising campaigns is that they work and the element of truth does not weigh highly in them, as in deed it should not. In observing the cognitive waters here, that is to say the ability of the conditioning to yields the desired effect, any objective measures whatsoever only serve to muddy the issue.
And before I get to the main idea I’d like to say something about prognosis, and especially negative prognosis and how someone can be correct constantly and yet no one pays any attention to them. Nouriel Roubini is one example. Simply put when the facts contradict the theory then the theory must be retroactively modified to fall in line with the evidence.
What I am about to say is the sort of thing one says when they are on the front lines. In other words I haven’t thought it out much but it goes like this;
We hear the bad news that for instance one and one is two and not fifty seven.
We say “Well, maybe that is so, perhaps pne and one is two but there’s a contested view point and someone else says one and one is fifty seven and since one persons opinion is as good as another I’d rather believe the more optimistic suggestion because I am an optimist.
Time goes by and lo and behold one and one turns out to be two. It is as this point that what we may call the cognitive reassessment has to occur. We could admit we were wrong - but this we are well aware - will tend to lessen the perceived value of our judgments in the future - and we don’t want that to happen.
So what we say, simply put, is “Yes. I am well aware that one and one is two, but things are not so bad, we can live with them and oh by the way did I ever tell you about two and two - there’s a new way of adding which Makes two and two equal one hundred and five.
And by the way which would you rather the result be two and two is four or one hundred and five?”
It’s the Charlie Brown place kick phenomenon and we’ve seen it happen hundreds of times since 1980.
As to the clarification of Wednesdays post that can be seen well in the strategies of Genghis Khan. The interesting thing about the Great Khan is that while western Europeans regard him as the epitome of barbarians the people of the steppes to this day regard him as the father of the nation, the great unifier.
His strategy was simple. Kill everything in sight. The word got out very quickly that he was someone you did not want to mess with. The resulting fear saved Mongol lives.
Potential warriors hearing that the Great Khan was coming would run for the hills. Nobody wants to be butchered in a hopeless cause.
In criminal justice work, on both sides, the law and the criminals, the object is to set up rows of dominoes. Push the first domino over and the rest will fall. This is why the temptation is to make an example of certain offenders. It is not legally and certainly not morally the right thing to do, but it saves a great deal of money when it comes to controlling the population.
This is what happened last week. The most egregious example, Megaupload was hit and closed, via somewhat dubious legal means that may or may not hold up in court and many of the other files sharing sites just took the hint and shut up shop.
I battle it’s called losing your nerve and it’s not a good thing. A disorderly retreat is an ugly thing because you have people running, presenting their backs to the opposition and paying no mind to who or what is chasing them. It is how a minor defeat can swiftly turn into wholesale slaughter.
In war there is no choice of supporters. Often you must fight with and for those provided not by ethos but by location, demographics or even religion.
The fact that the Obama administration waited until an election year to pay back big media is not difficult to understand but one has to wonder if all those middle class white kids getting the software and films for free are going to let it slide.
A real bitch, as I’ve mentioned before is that the damage has been mostly done. For the past twenty years the rest of the world has gotten it’s software for free and it has been paid for courtesy of American business and individuals.
A cop stopped my Uncle Harry for doing fifty in a forty mile zone. A guy goes by doing seventy. Harry says “What about him?” Cop says, “What about him? I got you”
In other words it’s a hundred times easier to prosecute an American then a Chinese. But the fact that the net result is a tremendous advantage to Chinese industry is just one of those things we prefer to ignore.
Advertising is stick and carrot. As in conventional warfare the information war is fought by postulating conflicting fears against each other. That and the sense must be established that your guy is omnipotent. He is the way of the future. Nothing can defeat him.
The bible is a fine source book for useful phrases
"For we shall conquer our enemies and with our sandals crush their heads into the dust”
The missile gap, Willie Horton, Bin Laden, the homeless - it only require that one jump to the appropriate fear generator to establish hegemony over the populations rational minds.
The usual ending for a piece like the above would be:
“Is this the best we can do?”
But that’s a little worn out, doncha think so?
To conclude, Congress can pass all the laws they want. What is frightening is not that both the left and the right wonder what’s gone wrong with the system, but the likelihood that the system is not collapsing per see, but rather being submerged
Perhaps the surest indicator of this is the dollar. Efficiency comes about from reducing redundancy in a system. Monetary speculators on the other hand live on such redundancies, but eventually they will greatly reduced.
Not that there’s any great hurry at this point.
Added later:
To go a little further into the perceptual modification of events.
Perhaps I ought to clarify this a little - especially since it is just that impulse to remember incorrectly that is probably setting into your mind about now.
In some regards it is an offshoot of cognitive dissonance theory which in turn is an outgrowth of the single strongest propensity of the human mind in terms of perception. That which it does not like, or like to think about it pretends does not exist. The primary culprit in this is death.
We don't like to think that life, having come into being, should simply vanish- end. So we suggest it does not end rather it goes somewhere else - to another plane of existance called the afterlife.
Likewise in comparing what is with what we said would be we don't like to consider the possibility that we could have been wrong. Confronted with facts we often find it easier to change what we said about something then the known facts. If we lived in solitude and everyone else disagreed with us from the beginning it might be difficult to pull this little switcheroo off, but we don't/
In the same way after the end of the second world war it was discovered that the vast majority of Frenchmen were in the resistance. Since no one cares to think differently the fiction is allowed to continue. Emile Durkheim called this phenomenon "the collective memory".It is a way of understanding and perceiving according to what is believed to be the greatest good - but it is not truth.
What is more and much more dangerous is the greatest good is rarely expanded beyond the scope of a particular group and hence is often used to justify the extermination of those beyond the definition of same.
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